Savestates contain the entire VRAM, so the fact that it still shows the prototype material doesn't necessarily mean anything.
That other build after CES looks neat. I wish we had a chance at seeing an even earlier build, or getting to see what BlueSky's version looked like. There's so much out there that doesn't seem like it would ever turn up. This is interesting research guys, keep it up!
I did a quick-ish run-through of magazines we have last night: Disney's Aladdin/Magazine articles I've identified three prototypes: The first is the actual Summer CES 1993 build I mentioned yesterday. Genie as a life counter, empty levels, not much going on. The second is this prototype. It was used, much like the Simon Wai Sonic 2 beta, as a tool for taking pretty, well composited screenshots which then turned up in a bazillion magazines. The third is somewhere in between this prototype and the final. I don't know the game well enough to clock all the details but it's basically "score on the left, final life icon". This issue of French magazine Player One kindly has shots of both 2 and 3: http://retrocdn.net/index.php?title=File%3APlayerOne_FR_034.pdf&page=12 However, more importantly, a month later they have off-screen photos of the third prototype, which suggests it may have appeared at an event around August-ish 1993. Aladdin doesn't seem to have appeared at ECTS Autumn 1993 so we can rule that one out. http://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:PlayerOne_FR_035.pdf&page=12 (note also they have screenshots from the "final" too.) So as a rough timeline: Early 1993: BlueSky stuff Late May? 1993: SCES demo. 27th June 1993: this prototype July/early August-ish 1993: third prototype August 1993: final game (according to the ROM) October/November 1993: Final game is released
As GerbilSoft pointed out, the first screenshot is likely to be useless (no offense). However, this second one intrigued me. As you probably noticed, the final game crashes to psychedelic background colors. But this screenshot suggests that the prototype jumps to a proper exception handler instead of doing weird palette cycling. So I took a crack at making the prototype crash myself. Of course, this is kind of a "no shit" thing because it is very important for developers to know exactly what is causing crashes during the development process. I just wonder why it was removed in the final game. That date of January 1991 is also interesting (imo).
I don't know if Sega had this policy, but Nintendo required developers to disable crash dump screens prior to release. One well-known example is The New Tetris for N64. There was a reproducible crash bug that they couldn't fix in time for release, so they replaced the crash dump screen with a "secret cheat" message (using what looks like the Commodore 64 font :v. EDIT: Actually, I'm not sure if it's the crash dump that they had to disable, or just fix all crash bugs in general. TCRF says "the developer had to close out all crashing bugs in order to ship".)
That was Virgin's US Fax number. It's also in Robocop Vs. Terminator. D.P. was presumably Dave Perry.
Mega bump, I know, but it looks like this demo is going to get officially released in the upcoming "Disney Classic Games: Aladdin and The Lion King". I wonder if it's the exact same build.
Also, this is pretty cool: https://twitter.com/frankcifaldi/status/1166755986352136192 You may already know Rich Whitehouse from his Digitizer format reverse-engineering work.
So how long until Toy Story gets the same treatment. The public knows for a fact the source codes and design docs still exist for it.
With Jon Burton being as active as he is I wouldn't be surprised if he was willing to give that game a "director's cut" treatment on a re-release the same way he did for Sonic 3D. I believe he even brought it up in one of his YouTube videos.
"Trade show demo"... looks like this prototype. As in, the one I spent all that time explaining wasn't from Summer CES 1993... in this very topic. If they're going to just nab things from Hidden Palace at least read my posts about it - I spent ages looking through old magazines!
It's amusing to think they'd be using the very ROM I dumped in my old apartment with a Retrode. I guess I'm now part of Disney history? It sure would be neat if they have some archives to reference that had the actual CES build though, since we know the text in this build was likely left over.
This looks seriously cool. I don't have huge nostalgia for the game, but seeing the efforts they have gone to, I'll buy this. I wish SEGA would do similar.
Game came out today and I have no money, anybody got some footage? I can't find anything, all I'm finding are people playing the final game.
So far, I've only seen one person play the old version in a live stream. I'm pretty sure more footage and videos of it will emerge over the coming days, though.
From what I've seen (and it's surprisingly hard to find footage), they're calling the prototype "demo version" (with references to SCES 1993) and it's uh... probably the same build as in this topic. Except they're skipping the level select-y options screen and the Sega logo (though not Virgin?) and maybe dictating the order in which levels are played. I don't know the prototype well enough - maybe bits are being missed this way, dunno. There's plenty of behind the scenes material mind you. Not sure how much of it is "new" (or how much they're avoiding mentioning the words "Sega" or "Nintendo") but something to explore at a later date. I'm not sure how much the target audience are interested in such things.
